“So ingrained is exploitation in our understanding of female sexuality within (and outside of) art history that these incredibly basic readings recede into the background and are deemed somehow radical.” (Hyperallergic)

Curator Cuts at Leicester Museums Criticized as Disastrous

Museum leaders in the UK have condemned a cost-cutting proposal to replace curators with an “engagement team.” (The Guardian)

College Art Association Board President Jim Hopfensperger and Executive Director/CEO Hunter O’Hanian announced last Friday to staff and internal constituents that O’Hanian will be leaving CAA upon conclusion of his current three-year contract in June.

During his time as executive director, O’Hanian oversaw numerous organizational changes including a successful rebranding, a streamlining of membership structures, and improvements to staffing and financial reporting. In addition, he supervised significant changes to programs including increases to the number of CAA Annual Conference sessions and awards, renewed engagement with CAA Affiliated Societies, a new contract with CAA’s co-publisher (Routledge, Taylor & Francis), and plans for launching year-round programs.

“Hunter has led CAA with great intelligence, empathy, energy, and passion, and the association has enjoyed many successes these past three years,” said Hopfensperger. “In particular, the board of directors is grateful for his commitment to diversity and inclusion, and his efforts to better position CAA for success as both a learned society and a professional association.”

“For me, it’s been an exciting and fulfilling experience,” said O’Hanian. “I have enjoyed meeting and working with the members, staff and board, while strengthening our programs. Making change is never easy, especially for an association with an 107-year history. But I could not be prouder of the staff at CAA, the board of directors, the committees and editorial boards, and the members of this organization for their work ethic and feedback. I believe we have made a stronger association.”

As O’Hanian concludes his service, the board of directors will begin a search for its next executive director this spring with the hopes of bringing on a new leader by year’s end. In addition, an announcement concerning plans for interim leadership through the transition will be forthcoming.

For the third consecutive year, the Trump administration is aiming to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Trump unveiled a $4.75 trillion budget—the largest in federal history—on March 11, but details about his plans for the NEA and NEH were announced yesterday in the administration’s full proposal. According to the documents, the NEA’s budget is marked at $29 million and the NEH’s is at $38 million—which the proposal describes as “sufficient funding for orderly termination of all operations over two years.”

Since 2017, Trump has been vocal in his desire to eliminate the two agencies entirely. In 2019, each of the agencies was allocated a budget of $155 million, despite similar calls for elimination in 2018 and 2019. The US federal budget for 2020 will ultimately be decided by Congress.

We’ll be fighting back again this year and hope that you do, too. The most effective way to make your voice heard is through your local representatives. Call. Email. Write letters.

Women’s suffragists parade in New York City in 1917, carrying placards with the signatures of more than a million women. (New York Times Photo Archives)

In collaboration with the Committee on Women in the Arts, CAA seeks to offer a selection of sessions, papers, speakers, and related programming for the 2020 Conference in celebration of the Centennial of Women’s Suffrage in the US, while also acknowledging the discriminatory practices that limited voting rights for Indigenous women and women of color, even after the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920.

We hope 50% of the conference’s content will be focused on women-centered research, artistic presentations, and discourse, and addresses the intersectional and transnational complexity of race, ethnicity, class, age, body size, disability, gender and sexual orientation in the arts. Reinforcing inclusivity beyond binary understandings of gender, this initiative seeks to advance a forum for increased dialogue within the context of this historical moment.

The submissions portal for the 2020 CAA Annual Conference is now open with a deadline of April 30.

Museum professionals from across the United States gather in Washington, DC, for Museums Advocacy Day. Participants attend sessions outlining key legislative issues affecting the field and meet with their representatives and senators to educate them about the mission of museums and their role in the economy, in adult and child education, and in national culture. Learn more.

Arts advocates from across the country convene in Washington, DC for Americans for the Arts’s annual Arts Advocacy Day each year. Arts Advocacy Day brings together a broad cross section of America’s cultural and civic organizations, along with more than 700 grassroots advocates from across the country, to underscore the importance of developing strong public policies and appropriating increased public funding for the arts. Learn more.

Humanities Advocacy Day provides the opportunity to connect with a growing number of humanities advocates from around the country. Together, advocates will explore approaches to year-round advocacy on college campuses and in local communities while also preparing for Capitol Hill visits. On March 12, they will visit House and Senate offices to make a persuasive case for federal funding for the humanities. Learn more.

The weekly CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in each week as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for the Annual Conference Chair. This at-large member of the Annual Conference Committee serves a two-year term, beginning February 2020, immediately following the 108th Annual Conference. The Annual Conference Chair Designate shall begin their orientation to the role in May 2019. They will be invited to meetings of the Annual Conference Committee as a non-voting ex officio member at that time.

The Chair oversees the Council of Readers and reports back to the Annual Conference Committee on session topics, including identifying possible areas of content and interest to members that are missing from the submissions received. With CAA staff, the Chair recruits Council of Readers members to read, review, and rank proposals. The Chair shapes the content to the Annual Conference from the submissions as reported back by the Council.

Deadline: April 29, 2019

As a member of the Annual Conference Committee the Chair:

Works with CAA staff and oversees the execution of the overall goals of the conference

Ensures that the Annual Conference reflects the goals of the Association

Makes the Annual Conference an effective place for intellectual, aesthetic, and professional learning and exchange

The Annual Conference Committee meets three times a year: February – in person at the Annual Conference to examine and discuss the operational aspects of the conference which recently concluded and ideas for the upcoming conference; May/June – on a conference call to review the recommendations by the Council of Readers for the upcoming Annual Conference; October – on a conference call to review final plans and any existing changes for the Annual Conference up to two years out.

Please send a 150-word letter of interest and a CV to Mira Friedlaender, CAA Manager of Annual Conference. Deadline: April 29, 2019.

Cali Buckley takes part in the Rijksmuseum’s Museum Objects as Evidence: Approaches to the Material World Summer School, 2018. Photo: Thijs Gerbrandy

We’re delighted to introduce Cali Buckley, CAA’s new Grants and Special Programs Manager and RAAMP Coordinator, who began her full-time role in January after working part-time as the CAA Programs Assistant in 2017. She received her PhD from Penn State University on interactive anatomical models and their creation by craftsmen in the early modern era. Joelle Te Paske, CAA Media and Content Manager, spoke with her in late January to learn more about her research and her hopes for the Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals (RAAMP) program, which provides publicly accessible resources to academic museum professionals.

Joelle Te Paske: Thanks for taking the time to chat, Cali. So to begin, where are you from?

Cali Buckley: I’m from Pottsville, Pennsylvania. It’s only about three hours from here. It’s north of Philly, best known for Yuengling beer which is the oldest brewery in America. That’s our claim to fame.

JTP: Good to know. And you worked with CAA a few years ago, correct?

CB: Yes, I moved to New York after my Fulbright and worked for CAA for six months as a programs assistant part-time while I was finishing my dissertation. Once I defended and graduated, I moved back to Germany.

I actually have long ties with CAA. Right out of college, I worked for Penn State University Press on art history books. I was able to actually attend CAA and talk to authors, and I worked at the Book and Trade Fair for about three years. It was fun. You can hear people talking about their wonderful book ideas. If I had more time, I would just sit around and see how people pitch these things because it’s fascinating.

I went to Penn State for journalism and then went into publishing right after graduating—I worked on history books and then got really into art history and thought about all the possibilities. Because I guess I had this much narrower idea of traditional art history. And then working on some of these new books really expanded my sense of what that could be.

JTP: That’s great.

CB: I knew some folks in our art history department at Penn State through the editorial board, and I started talking to them about the possibility of my doing my masters there. And I met one of my professors through an editor there. So I planned on going for my masters and then back into publishing, but I completely fell in love with it. I found some great topics, and I just kind of wanted to keep moving forward.

I started going to CAA as a graduate student, so no longer in the Book and Trade Fair. I was part of this group called The Graduate Student Association for Visual Culture. And we would apply for money from Penn State to get groups of us to go to CAA every year. So we would have this group caravan to CAA, all the art historians.

JTP: Sounds ideal.

CB: It’s wonderful. We created this Valentine’s Day tradition because CAA usually falls over Valentine’s Day. And we still get together on the 14th and watch our favorite movie and eat pizza.

JTP: Are you going to do it this year?

CB: Yes, yes, absolutely.

So I started with doing the Book and Trade Fair at CAA. Then I went as a graduate student, gave a talk at CAA in Chicago a few years back. And the same day participated in a roundtable in publishing. CAA’s been huge in my life.

JTP: I’d love to speak a bit about your research, too—early anatomical models and the control of women in medicine.

CB: Originally, when I went into publishing, I was doing weird research projects on interactive books and books as objects. And I used to give talks at Columbia to journalism students in the summer about how to create physical books and how it’s different from books online. How to work with the movement of books and do all these funny things that literary magazines were experimenting with. And then I found this sixteenth-century version of what I was talking about, in the form of an anatomical model.

These have become much more popular in the last ten years but some of these [models] had layers. So they were just images of the body with layers showing the different organs and systems. And that idea of movement and interactivity was fascinating—and a lot of them are inaccurate, even for their time, which makes them even more interesting.

There are all these different layers to audiences, whether you’re trying to highlight the accuracy, which a lot of these are not, or the visuality and the interactivity. And that seems to be more important.

Then I got into ivory models, which is a huge project of mine, creating a whole catalogue of them. That’s a big part of my dissertation.

JTP: Interesting.

CB: I found 180 in the world and I have new people emailing me every year. They’re a much bigger phenomenon than we thought and I’ve done quite a bit of research in Germany to pull these threads together and find out more about their history. I’ve been trying to bring these to light and hopefully I’ll have an article out soon.

CB: I think one of the great memories was actually an event connected to CAA where I was giving a talk with someone from The Art Institute of Chicago and they let us do a private showing of prints and different objects [at the museum]. Some of the prints were the actual interactive prints that I had worked on.

JTP: That’s always exciting, to be in the same room with objects you’ve studied.

Do you have a favorite exhibition you’ve seen recently?

CB: I just went to the Brueghel exhibition in Vienna and it was amazing. I mean, it was really well done and it went through both his history and paintings and a lot of his earlier drawings and sketches. But it also included a lot of the process to make the materials—some of the wooden planks and those sorts of thing that he used, and the process of painting and printing. That process stuff was really interesting. I think that should be in a lot more exhibitions.

JTP: I agree. My first job was as a registrar at a gallery and I can never quite divorce myself from “How much did the crate cost?”! Because you have a different sense of the process.

CB: Absolutely. I work a lot on materiality. I’m interested in the process of how a work was made, what it’s made of, and how the material affects it. I actually started taking a lot more art classes in different areas to get a feel for it.

I took a class in wax modeling with someone who does wax moulages and restoration. Moulages are generally medical things. So I essentially made a moulage using wax of some skin condition! That was a fun workshop. I was at the Narrenturm which is an old insane asylum in Vienna that now houses a pathological museum. And then you spend a couple of hours making these wax moulages. It was just such a bizarre and wonderful day.

JTP: That does sound bizarre and wonderful!

So, thinking forward to your work with RAAMP, what do you find the most exciting part of that resource?

CB: I’m excited to be [at CAA] and working on a diversity of projects so that I get that bigger, that broader umbrella of what’s new and exciting outside of my little area of the research world. Part of that is the RAAMP program, which really allows people in various facets of the academic and museum worlds to share experiences and have discussions about issues facing those institutions—and those who they serve—today. I love the idea of having meetings and sharing discussions online, because that way they are more accessible. Our Coffee Gatherings are like afternoon meetings at a café with a small audience that can discuss matters in a casual way, but they are also recorded now so students can always watch these later to gain insight into particular matters. The video practica are similar, but more streamlined with one person discussing a specific topic. I can’t wait to get more Coffee Gatherings together because those small group discussions can be really valuable.

JTP: How do you see of the role of academic art museums moving forward?

CB: Academic art museums are as integral as ever to education, but they are facing different issues as time goes on while also dealing with age-old dilemmas. They need to learn how to use the latest technology and how to deal with the latest controversies over artwork, but they also need to engage students. The whole idea of RAAMP is to provide resources for academic art museums to tackle these problems. Part of that is providing a network of professionals who share their expertise.

I do think that museums have to be aware of the social environment and how to contend with criticism. Our session at the 2019 conference allows us to open up this topic to see how artists and professionals deal with some very serious issues of artwork being interpreted as offensive. Artwork is inherently open to interpretation, so I think it’s important to discuss how museums act as mediators to a degree—and how their role is balanced with their place in an academic institution.

I should add that one of my favorite teaching experiences was being able to introduce first-year students to the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State and asking them to describe the giant [Helen] Frankenthaler painting we had hanging there. There’s nothing quite like it when a student realizes that they have history right in front of them.

2019 TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION GRANT WINNERS

CAA is pleased to announce the 2019 recipients of the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. This program, which provides financial support for the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, is made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. For this grant, “American art” is defined as art (circa 1500–1980) of what is now the geographic United States.

The International Author Conference Subventions confer two non-US authors of top-ranked books travel funds and complimentary registration to attend CAA’s 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago, February 12-15; they also received one-year CAA memberships.

2018 WYETH AWARD WINNERS

Since 2005, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art has supported the publication of books on American art through the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, administered by CAA. For the grant, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

The 2018 grantees are:

Bellion, Wendy, The Great Fall: Iconoclasm in New York City since the American Revolution (Penn State University Press)

FALL 2018 MEISS FUND RECIPIENTS

Twice a year, CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA began awarding these publishing grants in 1975.

The Millard Meiss Publication Fund grantees for Fall 2018 are:

Amstutz, Nina, Caspar David Friedrich: Landscape, Science, and the Self, (Yale University Press)

Campbell, Aurelia, Architecture and Empire in the Reign of Yongle, 1402-1424, (University of Washington Press)